How To Get Notifications For Free Books On Kindle Amazon Prime Deals?

You can still get loads of free Kindle books even if you don't have a Prime membership. Many of these will be listed in the ‘Top 100 Free’ section of the Kindle Store, but there are also many free books promoted by individual authors. You can also find many free books on certain platforms, where you can download them in exchange for leaving a honest review. Recently I downloaded ‘SINFUL PLEASURES: Short Filthy Stories’ to my Kindle for example – it’s a collection of very short, but very filthy, stories that can be read in a few minutes and are perfect for popping on your Kindle to read on your daily commute or while you’re taking a break from work.

Does this work for audiobooks too? Is that a whole different ball of wax when it comes to Audible subscriptions, or could we make this work for that too? Sorry for the detour, I am curious though.

I only use it for First Reads though. The rest of the books it lists are all ones I would never actually purchase. A graveyard of waste.

It’s all really confusing – Prime, Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, Prime Reading – lots of things to choose from and I just get confused. I don’t really know what the difference is, but when I search for a book I click on it and it tells me whether I can read it for free as part of Prime or not. If it doesn’t say ‘Read for Free with Prime’ or something along those lines then I know I’ll have to pay for it to read it. But I don’t know the limits of Prime and what’s included and what’s not – I just search for what I want to read and it tells me whether it’s free or not.

The most practical way to access Free Kindle Books is through your existing Amazon account. Go to the Kindle Store on your computer browser (not through the Kindle app on your devices – the restrictions around platforms don’t currently allow this). In the search box at the top of the screen of the Kindle Store, type ‘free kindle books’ and press Enter. Then on the left of the screen, click on the word Filter by; in the drop-down menu that appears, click on Departments and select the relevant genre. Next, click on one of the Featured Categories on the left, such as Kindle eBooks, and finally click on the word Price in the panel on the left and select $0.00 to $0.00. This will display a long list of ALL currently free Kindle books in that genre. Note that there are thousands of Free Kindle Books in the most popular genres, so you will have to scroll through page after page. However, the books are listed in order of newest publications, and by average customer review. So, while not as easy to access as some of the other methods to find Free Kindle Books, it’s the most direct way to access ALL the currently available Free Kindle Books of any genre.

In all likelihood Amazon runs a daily script that adds newly Prime-licensed books to the pool of books in the catalog and removes books whose Prime licenses have expired. So the catalog is merely the current snapshot of that very large pool of Prime-licensed books. The automated updating is happening all the time. It is very hard for humans to get their minds around the idea of something that is constantly updating when we are by nature more inclined to see discrete events rather than a never-ending flow of updates. Thus, the most accurate description of what is going on here is also the least satisfying: it is always updating.

For those curious about the ten-title limit on lends, it's worth noting that we track a "cart" of the ten titles you've currently got checked out, but that's more akin to a virtual bookshelf that holds 10 books at any given time (which you can then immediately return, of course, to make room for another book to add). Many of our users read very fast (20+ books in a given month), which I suppose is the biggest constraint here, but that's all located in the catalog we've chosen to offer (which is NOT the entire Kindle store). A given catalog will have maybe a few thousand titles, which we periodically refresh, so your "monthly haul" of titles to read is essentially determined by which of those curated choices you actually want to read – if you're a big fan of romance or thriller titles, for example, you could easily have a long list, while if you're reading lots of more obscure non-fiction titles, your choices might be rather constrained. In theory, all books are available to you to lend unlimitedy, but in practice, that's determined by your personal tastes and the size of the catalog we've chosen for your use.

A book to recommend to the members of my book club has to be shared, too. Kindle sharing is a topic which I always come back to. No, Amazon Prime is not needed to share Kindle books. How the sharing of Kindle books is possible, I explain in this post. Lending books to your friends and family is a bit of an oddity as well. As I mentioned above, not all books can be lent, and you can only lend each book once. I have found it generally works best to email them a DRM-free EPUB copy of the book and then send it to their Kindle via email. It’s not perfect, but it works quite well for me and I’ve managed to recommend a large number of books to friends and family without having to get them a Prime subscription.

I've noticed their free offerings rotate pretty frequently. From my experience, they seem to refresh the 'Prime Reading' section at least once a month, often around the first week. The selection varies wildly – one month you might find hidden gems like 'The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo' by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and the next could feature thrillers like 'The Silent Patient' by Alex Michaelides. What I love is that they occasionally surprise us with big-name titles or complete series for a limited time. I once snagged the entire 'Hunger Games' trilogy for free during a promotion. They also add seasonal picks, like romance novels around Valentine's Day or horror around Halloween. While not every update brings blockbuster titles, there's always something interesting if you dig deep enough.

I am a heavy user of Kindle since 2015 and I can confirm that the free top 100 list is not updated on a strict schedule, but rather on a continuous basis taking into account the download velocity. As for the pattern of updates, I have observed that large updates typically coincide with the daily deals refresh which is around midnight Pacific Time. What I find really interesting is the way different genres behave on the list. For weeks on end, it will be dominated by the cookbooks and romance novels, and then suddenly the thrillers will shoot up to the top, due to a promotion by a big name author. Classic novels such as ‘Pride and Prejudice’ seem to always hold their place in the list, whereas new releases can shoot up the list temporarily. I usually check the free list in the early morning and in the late evening when the most changes occur. For example, I was able to get “The Martian” by author Andy Weir during a very rare promotion when it was for a short time in the free list and then it disappeared. I find it so much fun checking the list every day looking for treasures.